Posted Feb 15, 12:05 AM in Games by Scott Conley

Now, I’m the last guy to hunting araound for reasons to praise Microsoft, but I have to admit that, over the past couple of weeks of Xbox 360 ownership, I find that the XboxLive-based achievement implementation is spot-on.

First of all, the basic mechanic is this: while playing a game and signed onto Xbox Live, certain actions in that game may trigger an ‘achievement,’ which is noted on your Live profile and carries some trivial bonus of ‘gamerpoints’ or something. Witty developers will label their games’ achievements with snarky labels (see below). Some certain achievements:

While playing Geometry Wars : – score a million points. (“Score 100,000”) – survive the first 60 seconds of play without shooting. (“Pacifism”) – accrue nine smart bombs. (“Quartermaster”)

While playing Call of Duty 2 : – defeat the game on ‘Veteran’ difficulty (the hardest setting) (“War hardened”)

While playing Tiger Woods ‘06 : – win five online matches. (“Getting the hang of it”) – win an online tournament. (“King of the hill”)

The cynic sees the Gamerscore rating as ridiculous pandering to hardcore competitive onliners: to accrue the most points, you have to play ALL of the games and basically beat them to death. This drives business to the game developers, which is pretty smart thinking by the console vendor. Smart or not, it’s so transparent it still irks many of us to see the number parked next to your name, begging you to spend more to increase it.

The part I rather favor on the other hand is the whole notion of allowing the game developers to themselves declare the noteworthy actions within the game. Further, accruing the achievement markers for hitting truly interesting accomplishments within the games is (for me thus far) satisfying, informative (about other gamers), and significantly enriches the gameplay of a given title.

It was in my opinion, an insightful move on Microsoft’s part to provide the platform for the Achievement system. If the heavy-handed upsell Gamerscore device is the sellout price to pay for the merit-badge achievement system, I suppose it’s a fair trade.

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